Larry Niven

This was probably one of the stupidest books I've ever read, and that's saying something, given several of the books I read last year, and the fact that I recently gave up on Butcher’s Dresden Files (god, that book was terrible). So anyway, the idea of the Ringworld is cool, and it was pretty neat to see the discovery of it unfold and to wonder about the mysteries it held. Unfortunately, everything else in the book was terrible.

The main character, Louis Wu, is a 200-year old idiot who is show more obsessed with sex and doesn't act like he is two centuries old at all. One reviewer here said of him, “the only way his age is relevant is that he frequently refers to being 200 years old,” and that's a pretty great way of putting it. He seems to have a way with ladies in ways that would not at all translate into reality, and at many times feels like an author insert written by someone who is very inexperienced. At this point it probably goes without saying that Niven has terrible attitudes towards women, and of the two that are in this book, both are described as stupid by most characters, both can't keep their hands off of Wu, and one of them has one of the stupidest character arcs I've ever read.

Teela Brown, as it turns out at the end of the novel, has been bred by the Pupeteer Master race (it takes Wu the length of the entire novel to realize they have this name because of their fondness for meddling) for genetic good luck, which is the most asinine plot point… I kept wanting it to go away but it was clear that Niven was really fond of it and kept fucking bringing it up. God, I'm glad this book is over.

Now, I feel a bit petty for bringing this part up, but I feel like I need to point out that Niven is terrible at naming things and places, both alien and Human, all sound incredibly stupid. It just pulled me out of the story in ways that I couldn't get past. Who the hell names a planet We Made It?!?! And Zignamuclickclick? If the clicks at the end are supposed to denote actual clicks, they ought to be transcribed differently, and otherwise alien names shouldn't sound too similar to human words. Human language phonetics are different enough, surely an alien race would be more different still. Also, “Tanj,” as an interjection, short for “There ain't no justice,” will never happen. It's a stupid word and sounds terrible. It doesn't sound at all obscene and cannot be spat out properly in fits of disgust and anger. Wu remarks at the beginning of the book that it is a good catch-all word, and uses it liberally. It is not.

At this point I feel I should address the plot, which many have called boring, but I feel that it was simply dumb. The characters mime their way through the act of preparing for what will be the most important voyage any race has undertaken, and then continually refuse to think ahead and act on impulse. I suppose these “accidents” could have been explained away by Teela’s “genetic luck” bs, but even then it just doesn't feel genuine. Luck cannot explain away someone's complete inability to think more than three steps ahead at a time. Many of the technological and scientific plot points are overblown and ridiculous--such as piloting an entire floating house around by gluing a fly-cycle to its bottom wall. Or using an invisible super-strong non-stretchable filament to drag said floating building down a hole in the Ringworld and somehow that catapults their damaged ship with no warp drive into space and all the way home? I still don't understand that ending at ALL. It was James Bond levels of technological stupid.

Meh. I'm glad this trash is over. show less

We make foolish decisions all the time, probably even several times a day. Mostly, they cause no harm, perhaps a little mild embarrassment, often no one witnesses the embarrassment but we know about it ourselves all the same. I have no idea why I decided to complete my exploration of Larry Niven’s oeuvre. I last read his books back in the early 1980s, and while I had fond, if incomplete, memories of some of the books, I also knew they weren’t very good. But, for some reason, I decided to show more read the rest of his books. I don’t know; perhaps I saw a couple of his books, with their pretty damn cool Peter Andrew Jones cover art, in my local secondhand sf bookshop, and thought, yeah, let’s give them a go, I liked them back when I was, er, fourteen or fifteen, what could possibly go wrong?

Everything, of course.

I’d remembered the ideas in Niven’s books over the decades, and I knew he was a proponent of "transparent prose”, which is what writers say when their prose is so bad it’s almost an anti-style, and yes, I’d remembered Niven’s politics were considerably to the right of mine (and not just because I’m British but because he’s a conservative loon)... but what I’d forgotten was how effortlessly offensive his fiction was. My sensibilities were still in flux back in my mid-teens, so perhaps I just skated over the worst bits and only took the good, if rare, bits on board.

The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton was not a Niven book I’d read back in the day. It’s a collection of three novellas set in Niven’s Known Space universe and featuring a single protagonist, Gil Hamilton. Who is an officer in the UN police, which is called ARM, Amalgamated Regional Militias (an unconvincing backronym, which Niven himself admits). Hamilton lost an arm in an accident in the Asteroid Belt, and developed a telekinetic arm as replacement - he has ESP, it operates like an arm, only not as strong, but it can reach through solid objects. See, the “long arm” in the title, it’s a pun: Hamilton works for ARM and he has a psionic arm too. Hoho.

Hamilton chiefly investigates organleggers… and this is where I have to wonder how I didn’t immediately recoil at Niven’s politics back in the day. Earth in the Known Space series has a population of eighteen billion, which means it’s massively overpopulated and covered almost entirely by cities. (Earth currently has a population of over 8 billion but there are still vast swathes of unpopulated wilderness. I can bore you with population density by country, but you can look at Wikipedia yourself.) For some reason, these 18 billion people have an insatiable demand for new organs. So insatiable, in fact, that pretty much breaking any law results in a death sentence so the criminal’s organs can be harvested. Having one more kid than licensed, for example. Or drunk driving. Which first supposes the death penalty is normal - it’s not, the US is an aberration (one of around 15% of nations). And second, that all medical conditions are solved by transplanting a new organ. It’s complete nonsense, complete right-wing nonsense.

The plots of the three novellas are almost incidental. Hamilton is, to be fair, a mostly engaging narrator. In the first story, Hamilton is confronted with the seeming suicide of a Belter friend by direct simulation of the pleasure centres of the brain. Except it goes everything Hamilton knows about his friend. It’s murder, of course. And Hamilton tracks down the killer. In the second, an attempt on Hamilton’s life leads him to suspect an organlegger who retired when the world government made it legal to use cryogenically frozen bodies for organs. The third story is one Niven freely admits he had the most trouble completing - it’s a locked-room murder mystery, of a sort, but also a sf story, which, according to the essay which ends the collection, took Niven several goes to get right… and even then it’s confusing, muddled and neither a good murder-mystery or a good sf story.

Everything in The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, although it mentions other nations, is Americocentric. Everything operates according to US laws and sensibilities. This is hardly surprising - it’s a US sf collection written by a US sf author for the US sf market. And that was not only common, it was the actual state of the genre for much of the twentieth century. So it seems churlish to point this out, except to say it makes these books - not just Niven’s, but other sf authors of his generation - irrelevant to a twenty-first century sf audience. show less

I strongly suspect and freely admit that my expectations going into a book substantially impact my enjoyment and ratings. I seem to be unable to manage this. Well, I went into this particular book with low expectations. It’s a 1985 hard sci-fi dealing with first contact and alien invasion. I prefer my sci-fi with a little less science and a little more wonder and atmosphere than most hard sci-fi. But dang it if I didn’t enjoy the heck out of this one. Sure, it starts a bit slow, it’s show more mildly misogynistic, a tad bloated, and it features gun toting baby elephants as the invading aliens. That’s right, small elephant-like aliens with a bifurcated truck that splits again with creating four digits on each trunk. This is no spoiler as it’s shown on the front cover (at least on my hardbound). Even the book’s characters can’t help but laugh the first time they see the aliens. But like the plot, there’s more beneath the wrinkly skinned exterior.

Let’s start with the plot, on the surface, it’s straight-forward. Aliens are approaching with a large generation ship, and they haven’t just come for our peanuts. The authors (yes, plural - Niven and Pournelle) do a skillful job of slowly revealing the aliens and their motivation, culture, and capabilities. I appreciated how not only were humans confused about the alien’s herd thinking, but the aliens are equally confused about our individualistic approach. It takes a while to get beneath the alien’s thick skin and really understand their backstory, society, and ethos, which is well thought-out and helps to drive a number of plot points. This is what really kept me turning pages and make this book fun.

It’s also epic (sort of like the movie Independence Day was epic). There were over a hundred characters and dozens of locations. The plot has plenty of twists and turns, nothing mind-blowing, but satisfyingly unpredictable. With Niven and Pournelle as ringmasters, I assume the science is accurate enough, and takes on some big technical challenges (especially the ending). The story is also a good blend of intrigue, suspense, and action.

The book isn’t perfect. I think it could have been trimmed in some places and expanded in others. I would have love to experience things like how the aliens dealt with jungle warfare and meet their first earth elephant. Instead, we are told about these events briefly and second hand. Meanwhile, we get to experience much detailed and tedious government organization and decision-making firsthand. Also, the aliens come across a bit thick. This is somewhat cleverly explained, but I still was bothered balancing their impressive capabilities with their lackluster intelligence. Of course, aliens might say the same thing about us.

An alien invasion extravaganza, driven by a slow reveal of the alien race’s history, purpose, and abilities, that makes for an entertaining tale by putting the entire planet in peril. Four stampeding stars! show less

I’m still not entirely sure why I’m continuing to read, or reread, Niven’s novels. He was never a favourite of mine when I was reading science fiction back in the early 1980s, although Ringworld does continue to hold some fascination. A World Out of Time, which is not part of Niven’s Known Space universe, was a reread – at least, I used to own a copy of the book (the 1982 Futura edition with the Peter Andrew Jones cover art) and I’m pretty sure I read it… But reading the book show more this year, none of it was familiar. And I’m usually pretty good at remembering books I’ve read, no matter how long ago.

Anyway, A World Out of Time is a Larry Niven novel. Corbell is dying of cancer, so he has himself frozen. And wakes in 2190, in the body of another man. Criminals in the worldwide State of 2190 have their personalities wiped. And the personalities of people who had themselves frozen in earlier centuries are then decanted into the criminals’ bodies (the process destroys the frozen body). The State which runs the world is mostly fascist, although Niven wants to present it as near-utopian. But people such as Corbell are considered less than human, and are employed in the sort of professions that would otherwise be occupied by slaves and, well, inmates in present-day US corporate-run prisons.

Corbell seems best-suited to become the pilot of a “rammer”, which is a single-person Bussard ramjet-powered spaceship which carries “biological package probes” used to terraform planets that are almost Earth-like. He is trained in his new role by being injected with RNA (not how it works, but never mind). Eventually, he is launched in his ship on a mission planned to take some 200 years at near lightspeed, returning him to Earth 300 years later. He’d spend most of the trip in cold sleep. But Corbell rebels, and aims his spaceship at the galactic core, intending to return to Earth 70,000 years later (not how it works, but never mind).

He judges it likely the State will still exist 70,000 years in the future, because it is a “water empire” but has no external enemies to bring it down (not how it works, but never mind; in fact, the concept of water empires has long since been debunked). Unfortunately, his watchdog back on Earth manages to upload his personality into the spaceship’s computer and it sabotages Corbell’s plan. So Corbell actually returns to Earth three millions years after he left.

Unsurprisingly, a lot has changed since 2190. Not least of which is that the Sun is now a red giant (which it won’t be three million years from now), and Earth has been moved into orbit about Jupiter. The State has long since vanished – eventually brought low by its own colonies. The secret of immortality was discovered, but only a select few, the Dictator class, were privy to it. But then an alternative process arrested development at the age of eleven, resulting in warring civilisations of immortal Boys and Girls.

On landing on Earth, which is now mostly inhospitable desert, Corbell is taken prisoner by the pilot of a Bussard ramjet spaceship who left centuries after him, and returned millennia before him. She had been kept in a “zero-time prison”, but later escaped. She is now old, but repeatedly mentions how beautiful she used to be (you can probably guess where that leads). She wants the secret of immortality for herself. Corbell escapes, and flees to Antarctica, which is temperate, and where some surviving Boys live in the ruins of one of their cities.

Nothing in A World Out of Time is even remotely believable, even for a science fiction novel. The trip through the galactic core manages to make a hash of everything from cosmology to physics. The Earth of three million years hence is just far too familiar – cars might fly, but cities have subways (and matter transmission booths, huh) and hospitals and police stations. The characterisation of the female antagonist is mostly offensive; Niven struggles to show the Boys are as super-intelligent as he tells us they are. The politics are everything you would expect of a white American male who lives a life of unearned wealth and privilege.

A World Out of Time is actually a fix-up of three earlier stories, and the State apparently makes an appearance in two later novels, The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring. show less